Breaking news!
Just heard that my favourite supermodel Emily Ratajkowski has written a collection of essays! Naturally, I immediately rushed to my local bookstore to secure a copy.
I say favourite because my wife and I blundered into Em (that’s what I call her now) shooting the 2017 Fall DKNY campaign. The dog-eared David Foster Wallace in her backpack gave it away. The doofus she’s with at 0:07 isn’t glaring at oncoming traffic, by the way, he’s giving me the evil eye because I was gawking.
Yep, that’s how it began. I gawked a bit more, then we left. But not before I decided that Em looked unhappy. So I’m hardly surprised to hear she’s now biting the hand that fed her all those years. Those awful male artists who used her image for profit “and left me with nothing” except, you know, stratospheric modelling fees and international fame, et cetera.
But that street in NYC was almost five years ago, a lifetime in a supermodel’s fleeting career, so you can understand her annoyance, for example, when some dude called Richard Prince, below, can steal one of her Instagram photos, fuck with it, then sell it for $80,000 — of which Em was not entitled to a single cent.
In Prince’s defence, a fan writes: “… he is delving as deep as he ever has into privacy, copyright, and appropriation, twisting images so that they actually seem to undergo some sort of sick psychic-artistic transubstantiation where they no longer belong to the original makers.”
Nah, he’s just a thief. No wonder Em’s pissed. She had to buy her own picture back from Prince so that she could then sell it — as a non-fungible token — which I have to say, given the choice I’d want the fungible version. It is totally fungible.
The NFT sold for $140,000 btw.
Em’s also been touched on the fanny by bad men, etc. You know, the usual stuff girls cursed with beauty endure for stratospheric modelling fees and international fame, et cetera.
But back to the book — now that she’s married to actor/director/producer Sebastian-something and is making babies, Em has to keep the $$$ rolling in somehow. I mean, what’s a girl to do when she’s married to a dude who looks like this??
Instagram and essays, obviously! Essays about the sick psychic-artistic transubstantiations that happen in young supermodel’s lives before they get old, have babies, shag Ben Affleck then marry a Sebastian. I give it three years. That aside, if the book is shit, she can still throw on a singlet and get fungible.
I’d pay a dollar for that. Naturally I also immediately watched Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” music video for the infamous exploitation but, you know, there isn’t any.
Sorry Em, but it’s like Lily Allen sings in The Fear (2009):
And I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
‘Cause everyone knows that’s how you get famous.